After aesthetics class I headed down the Bowery to meet up with someone I hadn’t seen in a couple of years.  We started with tacos at a place called Taquiera and then she took me to a rooftop bar/lounge about 4 blocks away and talked about many things. The bouncer was a friend of hers so we just went right on in. The place has been open for 4 months only. Not my kind of place, but it was OK.

I don’t connect with people easily. I’m just not a people person. I like people, and without my friends this life wouldn’t be worth living. But I don’t pine for large crowds of merriment. I don’t see the point of it and don’t enjoy myself in those settings. It’s hard not to observe everything as a social science lab. I focus unintentionally on how people stand and act, what they say and how they use their voices. I see people trying so hard to look like they’re not trying, and I see the people who are oblivious to what’s actually happening there.

I find it to be fine, but not as worthwhile as about a thousand other things I’d rather do than demonstrate an amiable personality type and establishing attraction with and from strangers in a crowded room. It’s just always felt weird and dumb to me and now I pretty much stand by it, instead of trying shake it off.

I feel my social high when I’m having an immersive, connected conversation, and that usually (maybe exclusively?) takes place with one person at a time.

I can fake being hyper social. I can make small talk and the BS of patterned speech. But sometimes I just don’t care enough about the other person’s impression of me to fake it for their sake. The only time I really fake it is for my sake. But it takes lots of energy.

I sipped at a beer and she had weird and complicated cocktails that cost $12. The lighting was blue and the music not too loud. But it was hot– still heat-waving at 11p on a roof in the Lower East Side.

She asked if I wanted to go up and check out her place– right in the heart of Chinatown in the tallest building around there. 25th floor, the view of the Manhattan bridge was amazing.

12am and I needed to go. On my way to the Grand St. station I got turned around twice. The little streets of Chinatown are tricky, winding and show up only as fine gray lines on google maps. When I eventually found the station, the next B/D train was a 30 minute wait. I changed at 59th St. to the 1 train, another 15 minute wait. After everything I was in my shower, rinsing off an incredibly long day by 1:30a, asleep by 2, up at 8, office by 8:45, conference call series from 9-11a.

I’m now ready to train like a motherfucker.

Supposed to go out again tonight.

Let this not be a pattern for summer, I have better things to do.

Yet, it would probably be good for me after other recent changes.

I yearn for simplicity of everything right now. Is that a hammock in the trees, going back to competing seriously, or pretending that nothing matters and just hedonizing.

The first two options mean life, the latter means death, and I have enough reasons to make the first option better, indefinitely.